Back in twelfth grade creative writing, Mr. Ives taught us foreign words we could throw into our stories to expand our creativity or merely impress our readers. Each day of class a new group of words would appear on the blackboard--- which was actually green--- and explain the significance of each funky combination of letters. He put these words on tests as sort of a vocabulary quiz, and though I probably got a 100 on all the quizzes, all the words have escaped me by now... except one. I only remember this one word, but its sound and meaning still ring vividly in my head.

Zwischenraum.

It's a word of German descent, and by descent, I mean it only exists over there. There is no true direct translation of this word into English. Essentially, zwischenraum (ZWISH-en-raum) represents those large, uneventful gaps in time. It's those times when you're sitting alone eating a bowl of cereal in the morning. It's those times when the commercials come on, but you effortlessly sit and watch the ads fly by. It's those seven hours you spend lying motionless, eyes closed, mouth open, in bed. It's you, right now, spending the last sixty seconds staring at the computer screen.

Mr. Ives mentioned how one of the strongest qualities of German film is in its careful use of zwishenraum, a feature ignored in most American film. The primary difference between life and movie is that in life, we face the physical constraints of the real world. This is not the case in movies, where a character can get from Providence to Aspen (name that movie!) within the hour. A fictional character does not stand at a red light for 45 seconds; he gets straight home.

This is why The Sopranos is my favorite set-in-the-real-world television show... ever. Sometimes scenes seem to go on longer than needed, while others seem completely irrelevant. The truth is, these moments of everyday nothingness give the characters a truer quality. In between whackings and screwing his goomah, Tony sits near the edge of the kitchen table, shaking parmesean cheese onto his rigatoni, mixing the cheese with his fork, then loudly chomps on his pasta, flashing a full-second glance outside the window before resetting his eyes on his bowl of food. He is the same as all of us, living through lapses of everyday redundancy that occupy our time before our next point of action.

My roommate set up a video camera a few months ago and aimed it at his computer desk. He set it to tape for one second of every minute. After an hour, he had sixty seconds of footage. He's browsing the internet, he's writing something down, he's scratching his head, he's out of the frame, he's rocking his chair, he's moving his mouse. An hour of his life is crammed into one minute, and this one minute seems insignificant. Nothing monumental or even noteworthy occurs.

I loved this project.

It is life, and therein lies the wonder of zwischenraum! Ninety percent of life is repetitive, normal routine that requires little concious thought. We take it for granted, but these moments are just as precious as the events we lock in our memory. Your seventy-ninth kiss is just as beautiful as your first. Not as memorable, not as special, but, because it is life, just as beauitful.